Choices about political candidates and issues are inherently limited and imperfect, causing many people to experience mixed emotions and even conflicting opinions about which candidate or position they prefer.
In general, ambivalence reduces political participation. The more ambivalent someone is about candidates in an election, the less likely that person is to vote.
We are social psychologists who study how people’s beliefs influence their behavior.
In a new article in the journal Science Advances, we find something that goes against the trend of disengaged ambivalence: The more ambivalent a person is about a political issue, the more likely they are to engage in violence and other extreme actions on that issue. supports. .
Ambivalent people are more supportive of extreme actions
In one study in a series we conducted, we measured the opinions of several thousand people in various surveys on one of many topics, such as abortion, gun control, or COVID-19 policy. We also measured how ambivalent they were towards that opinion. We then asked about their willingness to potentially take different actions to support their views. Some actions were mundane, such as voting for candidates that participants agreed with, donating money or volunteering. Other actions were more extreme, such as committing violence against their partisan opponents.
In other studies, we examined national data collected by researchers from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group and the Cooperative Election Study, which included similar questions.
When we analyzed the links between people’s ambivalence and their willingness to engage in or support a behavior, we found that across all studies, the results depended on the extremity of the behavior. As expected, more ambivalent people were less willing to support or participate in moderate actions such as voting. But contrary to our initial expectations, people who felt more ambivalent were also more willing to support or participate in the extreme actions, especially if they felt strongly about the issue.
Dealing with discomfort
In subsequent studies, we sought to understand why more ambivalent people expressed greater support for extreme political actions, from confronting political opponents or campaigning to have them fired to even more extreme acts, including violence.
We thought that one factor might be the psychological discomfort that ambivalent people experience: When people feel uncomfortable about their beliefs, they often look for ways to compensate by signaling strength. For example, when their beliefs are challenged, people sometimes respond by being even more supportive.
Similarly, we thought that ambivalent people might support extreme actions because they feel uncomfortable and want to express clarity and conviction about their beliefs.
Our results were consistent with the idea that people might compensate for their discomfort by supporting extreme actions: when we asked how uncomfortable participants felt about the opinions they held on the issue, more ambivalent people reported feeling less comfortable with their views, which was also related to their being more supportive of extreme behavior.
Extreme actions with real commitment
However, these are hypothetical behaviors. Are more ambivalent people actually more willing to take extreme actions?
We tested this by asking people about specific actions with real consequences. We gave participants the opportunity to commit funds to pro-environmental organizations known for their radical ideologies and tactics, such as sabotaging energy infrastructure and obstructing traffic – JustStopOil and EarthFirst! Alternatively, participants can choose to win some or all of the money themselves.
We found that people who were ambivalent about environmentalism spent more money on JustStopOil and EarthFirst! than people who were not ambivalent, especially if they had strong opinions about environmental issues. And this applied specifically to the radical charities. When given the same opportunity to donate to mainstream organizations – the Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy – ambivalent people did not spend more money than non-ambivalent people.
We did not directly test why people would strongly support environmentalism despite their ambivalent feelings about environmental issues. But perhaps it’s because people who worry about climate change also worry about the economic consequences of tackling it. Or people who struggle to make environmentally friendly choices and feel that they are not living up to their own standards. Or perhaps people with a more general form of political ambivalence, such as the belief that even good policies have compromises.
A bigger picture
The link between ambivalence and support for extreme actions in our studies was one of correlation: two items are linked, but the cause of that link has not been determined. So we cannot be sure that ambivalence is the cause of that support. Maybe the relationship goes the other way and supporting extreme actions makes people more ambivalent. Or perhaps some other factor we’ve overlooked affects both.
But when we looked for evidence for these alternative explanations, we didn’t find much. For example, changing whether we asked about ambivalence before or after asking about support for the extreme actions had no effect on the results. And while extreme behavior is related to other factors, such as a tendency to be aggressive, ambivalence still mattered even when we compared people who were similar on those other factors. Yet we do not yet know everything about the relationship between ambivalence and extreme action.
The psychology of extreme behavior is complex. To explain its causes, many studies highlight that some people are particularly susceptible to extremism, including those who have difficulty regulating their emotions. Our research suggests another possibility: that some beliefs themselves have characteristics—particularly ambivalence—that promote support for extreme actions.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and trusted analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Joseph Siev, University of Virginia and Richard Petty, The Ohio State University
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Richard Petty receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Ohio State University Office of Research.
Joseph Siev does not work for, consult with, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.